I have a friend who runs a small Facebook meme page (not monetized so that’s not a factor), and the content is pretty unmistakably fairly often explicitly leftist and/or queer and so is the audience. They’ve said that every time they post a picture with gender identity and sexual orientation-related keywords the audience of the post is lower than it is otherwise, ie. it gets shown to fewer people compared to other posts made around the same time. Whether this is actually true or not is anybody’s guess since my friend has definitely not been systematic about this and the variation might just be noise.
Now even if it is true, it it doesn’t necessarily mean Meta is intentionally suppressing that stuff, and it might just be that the content just is less popular and it has nothing to do with it having the word “gay” or whatever, but I’m not entirely convinced it’s not malicious either. Meta has a real habit of leaving actual hate speech be when reported, but happily removing comments from people calling an actual homophobe a homophobe etc. etc. Apparently there was a picture of Hitler with the text “miss me yet?” making the rounds; my friend reported it and got told it’s fine 🤷
Meta has a real habit of leaving actual hate speech be when reported, but happily removing comments from people calling an actual homophobe a homophobe
Exactly my experience. Homophobe says heinous shit. Report them and then call them a bigoted piece of shit. My comment removed, theirs left, me banned for a period of time.
Then they did me the favor of permanently banning me for posting that nude image of trump… Lol, a year or more after I posted it.